Minimize the chance that your next experiment turns out to be a waste of time and money by assuming that half of your samples will turn out wrong, and that one of your experimental variables will mess everything up.

Half of your samples will be useless

If they turn out to be useless, you will be covered. If they come out great, you will have enough replicates to be confident about the significance of your results.

Also, you don’t know which half will fail, so mix up the replicates. If you have two groups of ten patients, and you can only extract blood from ten patients in a day, don’t do one group each day, do five from one group and five from the other each day. If you are sequencing their RNA, don’t use one lane for each group. If each lane has samples from both groups, you can correct lane effects and you will be covered in case one lane is faulty.

I have been working from home since 2008 and I love everything about it: the freedom to set my own work hours, the lack of interruptions, the life-transcending 20-minute power naps after lunch. Working without adult supervision is empowering, but it can also be stressful. I remember the anxiety I had at the beginning, when I didn’t know if I was working enough or too much, and struggled through work marathons that left me feeling tired and unproductive. Everything changed when I started tracking my work hours on a spreadsheet. Seeing how much I was slacking or working took away all the guiltiness and stress of my workday.

Biologists preach to their undergrads: “Write down everything you do in your lab notebook or in six months you will not remember why you did it”. Quite true. I have tried to embrace this philosophy several times with pitiful results—probably because every time my subconscious convinced me that it wasn’t worth the pain of implementing it; my code is in some file in my computer, so why bother?—Luckily, one day I discovered knitr and became a lab notebook fanatic.